While our friends at redstateTrike Force HQ and elsewhere are busyprostituting themselves to corporations that profit greatly from selling dinosaur era fuel, all their jumping up and down is profiting them little.

They think they have debunked the climate change ‘myth’ conclusively. They are of course wrong, but, trapped in their self amplifying echo chamber, they are largely oblivious to this particular aspect of reality. Of course, they do believe the “MSM” (“main stream media”) are playing their obvious role in the international conspiracy to trick the public into believing in AGW (anthropogenic global warming). Their explanations of the motivations for the vast green conspiracy were always vague and nebulous, but lately seem to revolve around some sort of scheme to enrich Al Gore.

Environmental issues are probably not in and of themselves election deciders for most people. However, they are a strong, if sometimes less attended to, undercurrent that helps shape not only how people vote in individual elections, but also the very foundation of their worldview. This is another in a long string of societal questions that the rightwingers and Republicans have been on the wrong side of.

By attempting to appear credible while obtusely denying global scientific consensus, they are loosing not only a generation of young people who are still working out where they stand socially and politically and who care about climate change — they are also hurting their ethos with others and, even more broadly damaging, they are yet again showing themselves to be completely lacking in intellectual honesty and any interest in rational civic discourse.

So how do progressives, liberals and like minded Democrats respond to this epochal rightwing and Republican failure? Satire, mockery and ridicule.

I read or heard this description recently, but I can’t recall the source: the rightwingers and Republicans have been reduced to a coalition of cynical liars and the willfully ignorant. Neither segment of the alliance is very open to reason and persuasion.

But we’re not trying to appeal to them. Max Bumenthal provides a good description of the sado masochistic impulses that propel so many of them to a rightist authoritarian world view. They are the 20-25% who love the Cheney family television road show and think Bush was the most bestest president since St Ronald the Dyed and they are a lost cause.

However, there’s a much more amorphous and ill defined group, including many younger people, who either have not formulated their worldview or who are true independents and can, at least potentially, vote for either party or even a third one.

This group is open to reason and persuasion — we persuade them by being reasonable. And, at this point in the rightwing and Republican devolution, the reasonable response is satire, mockery and ridicule.